Movie Monday - 1/28/2013

I had been hearing about how violent Django Unchained is and I was a little nervous about seeing it.  Maybe I am desensitized these days, because I found the violence (and there is quite a bit) not gratuitous in the least.  In fact, quite a bit of it is justified in the context of the film. But then, that's what Quentin Tarantino is all about, in my humble opinion.  Jamie Foxx stars as Django (D-J-A-N-G-O...the D is silent), a freed slave who joins a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) in hunting down people wanted for various crimes, until he can rescue his wife from her cruel master.  Leonardo diCaprio, Don Johnson, Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington also star.  I thought it was pretty entertaining.

Carnage is about two sets of parents who get together to work out an incident involving each couple's eleven-year-old son.  During an altercation at the park, one of the boys hit the other in the face with a stick.  In the course of the afternoon, polite and rational conversation disintegrates into blame-placing and name calling.  Better, the parents should have left the kids to work out the apologies on their own.  Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz star as the parents.  The acting was great.  Overall, the movie was alright.

In Persian with English sub-titles, A Separation, is the story of an Iranian couple trying to do the best thing for all the members in their family.  They want to leave the country in order for their eleven-year-old daughter to grow up in better surroundings.  The wife wants to leave now, but the husband wants to stay a little longer, as they are caring for his elderly with dementia father.  Even though they don't want to, they go to divorce court.  The husband hires a woman to care for his father.  There's an incident that claims a life. The story is more than the sum of its parts.  The film is a study on being Muslim in a modern world.  It is more complicated than one would assume.  I liked it.

MK out.